trol craft is a well-known trade commodity in industrial, production and competitive environments. In this context, one cannot overlook the role of American engineer William Edward Deming, who was among the first to innovate in the field of industrial quality control. He applied it to a central goal, which is primarily to meet consumers’ demands (1) . With regards to media, and more specifically news media, the central goal is to champion transparency, honesty, objectivity, and avoid hate-monger- ing. While all media organisations and workers agree on monitoring quality, they differ on the meaning of quality and how it manifests in practice. Mainly, the differences of opinion on quality are aesthetic, moralistic, value-oriented, or commercial, or could relate to ownership style problems or issues. This is because the rules of media and moral quality are not a stable or specific set of rules, but matters that practi- cally develop inside the media environment. These issues are typically discussed among those tasked with monitoring quality from one side, and among journalists in the newsroom on the other side, with the ex- pectation this process will result in acceptable and agreed-upon rules, standards and formulas that govern their actual application (2) . There are two schools of thought that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The first is European and tied to official television channels, and the second is American and applicable to a more commercial per- spective. The former was concerned with the extent to which media content met the cultural and educational goals for which channels were established, and the extent to which these goals and assignments were met. The latter relied on viewers and advertisements as the measure of quality, and was mainly concerned with viewer numbers and the ad- vertisements and revenues it provided to its owners. In both cases, “no special frameworks or entities [were established] to monitor and regu- late quality in a systematic and constant manner. The matter was some- times referred to external organisations on a quarterly basis, especially (1) Hassan Alaa al-A’asam, Edward Deming’s Life and Achievements, the Spiritual Father of Comprehensive Quality Administration , 2012-2013, https://bit.ly/2YGZmjm (accessed 21 February 2021). (2) David Gordon et al., Controversies in Media Ethics , Third Edition (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 8.
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